down_time wrote: ↑Fri Feb 23, 2024 7:04 pm

At 2.24am on 28th November 2019, a surveillance camera affixed to the Thames headquarters of the British spy agency M.I.6 captured sudden movement outside a building across the river. The building’s façade featured curved balconies overlooking the Thames, the camera recorded a figure walking out of a brightly lit fifth-floor apartment. He went to one corner of the balcony, then to the other. Then, returning to the center, he jumped. Shortly after 7 a.m., a passerby spotted a pale body on the riverbed. Somebody called the police, and the London Ambulance Service soon arrived.

Four people were in the apartment earlier that evening. Verinder Sharma, known to friends as Indian Dave, a gangster arrested in 2002 on heroin-smuggling charges and later implicated in the murder of a bodyguard turned night-club owner, Dave (Muscles) King, who was killed in a drive-by shooting in 2003, as he was leaving a gym in Hertfordshire. Akbar Shamji, a wealthy businessman and graduate of Cambridge University, in his forties who lived and worked in Mayfair and Sharma's daughter, Dominique Sharma Clarke.

The fourth was known to the others as Zac Ismailov, the wealthy child of a Russian oligarch who's father had recently died, and who's mother lived with Zac’s siblings in Dubai. Zac had claimed that his family owned a penthouse unit in One Hyde Park—a superluxury development in Knightsbridge famous for its secretive, often absentee tenants. He had been introduced roughly eight months earlier, by a man named Mark Foley, who worked for Chelsea Football Club, a team then owned by the Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich. Three days after being discovered the body was identified as Zac Brettler an 18 year old MIll Hill schoolboy from Maida Vale.

Four years later, after a series of police investigations, a coroner's inquest and the mysterious death of a second person present that evening it is still unclear what went on in the apartment and what drove Zac to leap from the balcony. A doctor who’d begun an autopsy concluded that some of Zac’s injuries, including a broken jaw, indicated possible foul play. What is clear is that Zac was by no means the only impostor in the apartment that night. Dave Sharma was a leg-breaker posing as a benevolent mentor. Akbar Shamji was a dilettante posing as an accomplished entrepreneur. And Zac was just a London kid, posing as the son of an oligarch. Each was pretending to be something he wasn’t, and each was caught up in the glitzy, mercenary aspirational culture of modern London.

There is too much weirdness in this story for me to include it all here, for a full account: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024 ... underworld
WARNING: This is a long-form article, so if you don't like reading you may as well skip it.